This invention has relation to portable campfire cooking grills of the type in which a plurality of parallel, spaced-apart rods are positioned over a ground-supported campfire or bed of charcoal to broil, boil, fry or otherwise prepare food in an "away-from home" situation; and in the situation where such cooking grills must be carried to and from the cooking site whether cleaned or uncleaned, stowed in vehicles and/or backpacked for transport to or from the camp site/-cooking site, and stored at the "home base" between uses.
Cooking grills of the prior art include parallel spaced-apart rods mounted in rigid rectangular frames which can be supported, for example, at opposite ends by top edges of indigenous rocks built up at semi-permanent campsites by previous campers. Typical of this usage are the fireplaces provided at portages on the canoe trails of the wilderness canoe areas of our northern states and maintained by the U.S. Forest Service. In these situations, no legs directly attached to the cooking grills are needed.
Other similar rectangular cooking grills do include legs. These legs can consist, typically, of spike-like rods formed with top loops so that they literally dangle from each of the four corners of the cooking grill, and can be pushed down into sandy soil or other soft ground where rock or major tree roots can be avoided to support the cooking grill in a horizontal plane and at a proper height above a charcoal fire in a pan or a trench-type cooking fire.
In each of these situations, and in the case of other cooking grills having either rectangular or circular fixed support rims to which parallel spaced-apart rods are fixed, after the grills have been used for their intended purposes, the parallel rods forming the cooking table can be covered with burned on grease (splatter from a fry pan), meat and vegetable particles (broiling meat and kabobs and roasting corn), and just plain old soot from the cooking fire itself (from boiling and heating water) and from broiling, roasting and frying meats and vegetables. The problem of cleaning such solid, flat cooking grill tables and/or packing them out either cleaned or dirty, storing them at home until "next time" either cleaned or dirty, and then again packing them in to a campsite is a difficult one at best and is a frustrating one to say the least.
Such cleaning problems are aggravated because of the tendency to leave the cooking grill in place after it has served its purpose and while the cooked food is being eaten. In this situation, as the fire under the grill "dies down", the suet, fat, grease, and food particles are firmly baked on, just as enamel is baked on to other metal products at the factory.
Even after the cooking fire has gone out, been removed, or the rigid grill table has been removed from the fire and allowed to cool, the grill table must either then be cleaned or somehow covered or packaged so that it can be carried out without its soot and other unwanted substances being transmitted to other people, clothing or things with which it comes into contact. This means that it must either be cleaned at the camp site or covered in some kind of a canvas bag or the like for transport and/or storage. In the latter case, it must then either be cleaned upon reaching "home base" or it must be used "dirty" or cleaned and used "next time".
Cleaning at a camp site where all of the water has had to be brought in, presents the problem of use of a limited amount of used dish water, rinse water, or cold or specially heated water on a cooking grill which, by definition, must be larger in area than the pots it supports to heat such water. This means that any water with detergent which is used in a dishcloth or even on indigenous grasses can be used only one time and then lost as it soaks into the grasses and soaks into the ground beneath the grill. In campsites by lakes, rivers and streams, the use of sod cut from the campsite to scrub the cooking grills right down in the body of water itself is now no longer proper or even advisable because of the pollution which thousands upon thousands of such similar usages has caused to our endangered seashores, lakes, rivers and streams.
Use of the cooking grill assembly of the present invention will obviate or substantially lessen such problems.